Saturday, August 13, 2011

I'm fresh off the Willamette Writer's Conference here in Portland, where upwards of 800 other brilliant, ignored writers convened to learn the intricacies of subplots, polish their prose, and conspire to make sure no agent enjoyed an unmolested moment. Every attendee harboring a screenplay or a novel was desperate to find that one missing piece: the champion that would recognize the worth of her output and grease her path to acclaim. We are writers, with massive if mythical audiences, and we lack only the final link of representation to stand in the golden sunbeam of glory that is our due.

Well, close. Turns out we are content producers, and we lack only the will to tweet. In workshop after workshop we were implored to become web wranglers, riding the range of publicity and gathering our herds. Today we tweet! Tomorrow we will honk, or gabble, or yawp, or chase whatever tumbleweed will have replaced Twitter after it rolls out of favor. The news left the cohort in my general age group a little deflated. Our brains have changed since the days they were open to learning. They have already undergone a sort of fossilization process wherein the soft young spongy parts are gradually ossified into kernels of rigidity and grumpiness. All right, tweet we shall, if tweet we must. But there's a daunting array of buttons to push to make this happen and we're not at all clear about how this is supposed to work anyway. I did what comes naturally when I'm faced with a lot of stuff I don't understand. I retreated to something I did understand. I went off to take a dump. The toilet has always been the scene of some of my most reliable content production.

The bathrooms at the Sheraton are shiny and clean and freakishly eager. Anything you walk by is liable to go off. Paper towels grope towards you, water shoots out and soap oozes and beckons. I tried waving my hands in front of the mirror but my youth and acuity did not return. I chose a stall and sat down to ponder my literary fate. When I got up again to recombobulate my underwear, the toilet flushed for me. I should be grateful, but I am disturbed. I prefer to be more closely in charge of the flushing decision. There is only a thin line to cross before my appliances begin to judge me, and I get enough of that attitude from my computer. Worse, the toilet made only a half-hearted horking hairball sound. It was a premature evacuation; it didn't quite do the job. So I looked for a handle or button.

No handle or button. Obviously some kind of movement, other than the one I was trying to get rid of, was required. I waved at the back of the toilet. Nothing. I turned around in the stall. Nothing. I tried replicating the original motion of backing into the toilet. Nothing. I waggled my fanny at it as though I meant business. It was unimpressed.

There's something about this situation. Even though I was the producer of the contents of the toilet bowl, and had been in their immediate vicinity not a minute earlier, somehow I was loath to actually sit back down on the seat. Evidently we achieve emotional separation from our effluent very quickly, because I was now looking at it as though someone else were to blame. I did a version of the chicken dance and prepared to give up, timing my exit such that there would be no witnesses. But in the act of opening the stall door, the toilet, which is probably still chuckling with its buddies at its own convention, went ahead and finished the job. "And then I got her to waggle her fanny at me," it says, munching on a toilet cake. "Dude," its buddies say.

The fact is, there are certain things, and one thing in particular, for which you want your home toilet. Your home toilet might not be as good, but you're familiar with it. You have mastered the details of handle-jiggling and the toilet's own digestive limitations. And if something goes wrong, it's just between you and your plunger, and no one else needs to know. One of our toilets is delicate. The handle is more of a nipple and needs to be stroked upwards with a precise degree of care. Strangers using this toilet are more apt to yank on the handle, causing them instant regret and an intense yearning for their own home toilets.

There is no reason to expect the toilets at the Sheraton to stay mired in the past just to soothe my aging sensibilities. Time marches on, in the writing and plumbing worlds. I might think my shit is good, but I'm going to have to learn where all the new buttons are to get it to go anywhere.

I sympathize with the whole Twitter thing. I listened to the same gurus, and hauled my curmudgeonly ass over there about a month ago. It's actually not as bad you think it's going to be. If you use an application like Tweetdeck, it makes it even easier.

Look me up if you take the plunge: @DianeHenders. And I'll follow (stalk) you back. Now there's an incentive. :-)

Gal, your shit don't stink. Tweeting is a conspiracy by published authors to ensure that those with talent spend all of their creative energy typing "lol" instead of improving their craft. They sit behind the wall with the toilet conspirators chuckling at every tweet (and plop).

I attended the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference a couple of weeks ago. One of the big topics there was ebooks, although nobody seemed to know where the technology was going -- maybe because they still had those old fashioned toilets we had to flush ourselves.

I don't know what I expected when I was drawn to read this blog--the title promised...less than I got. Isn't that the way it always goes.Anyway, I think that you had no choice--you made your bed, and you can damn well lie in it. Oops--wrong aphorism. Um. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. No. Not that one either.Um, um--tapping fingers on lip. Ah--you can lead a horse to water...Oh, hell with it. Just sit down again, and get up. Man up. Or woman up.Whatever.

Roxie sezI, too, resent toilets that flush for you. Sometimes they are set hyper-sensitive and will flush if you as much as lean forward (which is sphincter-clenchingly startling) and sometimes you need to find the electric eye and clap your hand over it, placing the receptor in total darkness for at least ten seconds to trigger any response at all from the plumbing.

I mean, damn it, -I- know when I want to flush!

As for tweets and twitters, I have been there and been spammed by dozens of people pleading, "Please buy my book!" "My book si great! Spend money on it." "This is the best book you'll ever read and worth every penny." "If you don't buy this book, I'll shoot a puppy." and so on. How can I compete with that? I have fallen back to hoping that a winning lottery ticket will blow in the window of my car while I drive down the freeway.

A scary thought, a toilet that does its thinking on your behalf. And how much do you want to bet that it felt you had been there toooo long it would flush to eject you. James Bond toilet gadgets. A girl could get constipated thinking about it.

The terlets in the library at work flushed with such astonishing gusto that they sucked the contents out, bypassing normal sewage disposal systems, hurling them into a space-time continuum between universes. They were terrifying. I just dislike the ones that think they know when to flush; they don't strike raw terror into me. And you're right. They usually do a half-assed job.

I think the worst thing isn't that the toilet thinks for you, but that it's really smarter than you. Oh, Tiffin, we had one of those toilets in this house. It sounded like the space shuttle taking off. If you hadn't really gotten rid of everything you could have, you did once you flushed. It developed a leak, thank God and Mr. Sledgehammer, and Dave replaced it with something more demure.

This is one of your best! When the toilet-flushing-too-early happens to me, I do try to get it to flush again, but when it doesn't, I try to sneak out without my legs touching the toilet. Never works. (Why do toilet stall doors open IN?) If someone is waiting to use that stall, I make a resigned look and say, "That toilet's kind of disgusting," implying, of course, that I had no part in it.

I used TweetDeck for a while. I didn't like it. It friended a bazillion people that I didn't even know, and kept track of all the old stuff that had been posted months ago. Turned into something of a data hog--so I got rid of it. I just log in at Twitter now, and maybe once or twice a year collect my thoughts into 255 characters or less. I have to keep track of my login/password, though, because my addled brain just can't handle the 255 logins/passwords that I have to remember at the office, let alone the ones I need at home. Thank God for my Android, or I'd forget to go to the bathroom in the first place.

Don't change a thing for me. Don't add, don't subtract, just write complex humor better than anyone else out there and let them eat their hearts out.

I've tried reading a few articles and e-books, browsing a few blogs about how to blog. And I've read what people typically produce after one of those gung-ho blog networking conventions. When commercial success is the goal, quality craft goes down the toilet.

Tweet on and I shall follow, but I can't think we're meant to keep up with all the latest (it terrifies the young people when we invade their social networking sites) We, your loyal cohort, will all still be right here where we found you.

I don't think you can be condensed into a Twit. You're too complex, and we all enjoy the intricacies of your sentences, thoughts, rightful complaints on the "new" technologies which dumb-down everyone using them. Please be true to your loyal readers and yourself!

And how does one respond to this? Writing and evacuating one's bowels? Toilets that don't flush and writers that don't tweet? Modern technologies and primitive necessities. Quite an interesting juxtaposition! An interesting and humorous metaphor!